• Who are they?

Who are these difficult people? Not their names, but rather some of the adjectives that describe them:
Hostile: Angry.
Know-it-alls: Two kinds really. There’s the real ones, actual smart people who “just want to help” and the difficult bogus know-it-alls.
Whiners or Complainers: Don’t really want anything – just want to complain.
Royalty: Entitlement.
Emotional Vampires: suck the life right out of you.

In dealing with each of these, we are gaining experience. Gail and Pam quoted Aldous Huxley: “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.” Sharing our stories when we have these experiences helps us to come up with what we say in difficult situations.

• What was it really about?

Gail and Pam acted out a scene where a patron who felt more comfortable not using the self-checkout, and who wasn’t able to immediately produce her library card. The situation wound up being more about a rude librarian and the desire for power and control. Many situations can be boiled down to these two elements. Who’s got it, who wants it, and who’s willing to give it up? One path to good customer service is to work to decrease your power while increasing your control of the situation.

Three things to keep in mind: what you think, what you say, and how you behave.

It is useless to argue with someone who is angry.  In every conversation there needs to be an adult. You’ll never win an argument with a difficult person. They are far more experienced at being difficult. Because you work with the public – you are a target.

• What do they want?

What do all people want? They want:

1. To be heard.
2. Understanding & Empathy.
3. Fairness.
4. They want you to fix it.
5. Power.

Everybody who works in the library has tremendous amounts of power. You can give them what they want – or not. Smile, or not. When you give these customers these other things — you give them the illusion that they have some of that power back.

• What do you want?

When there’s somebody difficult in front of you – what do you want? It’s easy to say you want them to go away. You should want to arrive at a common understanding and do so in an agreeable productive manner. What is it that keeps you from them? This is where you must ask yourself “what are the buts in your head?” e.g. “I would do that but…” “I would waive that fine but…” and some examples to the second half of that statement: “I’ve done it for her before.” “You smell funny.” “It’s not part of my job.” “You can do it yourself.” “If I do it for them, I have to do it for everybody.”

In order for you to do what you need to do in a productive manner – we need to get the buts out of our heads.

• What do you do and how do you do it?

This portion of the session dealt with particular strategies for dealing with stressful situations.

Two phrases that will fix or avert plenty of your difficult situations:

1. I’m sorry that happened.
2. I can take care of that of you.

Hear them out. Listen. REALLY listen. Don’t cut someone off, or you risk them starting over. The story doesn’t get any better the second time around. Zip your lip and zip your emotions. We have TWO ears and ONE mouth, we should use them proportionately.

At the start of the session, q-tips were passed out to the attendees. At this point it was explained that QTIP was an acronym for “Quit Taking It Personally.” We all need to know our hot buttons. These are the things that people say that instantly shut us down. If you aren’t aware of your hot buttons, you should check with your family and loved ones, as they know how to push your buttons best.

A lot of situations can be helped if we make sure that we tell people the rest of the story. When a parent asks a staff member to watch their child, that staff member should go from simply “We don’t allow unsupervised children in the building”  to the more complete “This is a public building and thus anyone can come in to the building. For the safety of your child, they should stay with you. We just don’t have enough people to look after her.”

Stop and take a breathe. Carry a pen. If things start to get hectic and you can feel your buttons being pushed, drop the pen. This will give you a moment to collect your thoughts and slow the situation down.

Remember that the vast majority of the people at your library are appreciative that you are there, tickled to death that you are there. We tend to remember the 2-3% – they are memorable – but please remember that the vast majority are in your corner, love the fact that you are there and love the services that you offer.

Customer service for Victoria is valuing your customer and making them feel important. Her scope of “customer” is broad. Customers include both “internal” and “external” customers who have a present and future interest in your organization and who you consistently value and deem important through attitude or actions. Internal includes staff, volunteers, board members and elected officials. External includes patrons, other libraries, other city departments, vendors – anybody who is “external” to the organization.

Her secret formula for sensational customer service? P³ & C³ = SCS

The formula incorporates the following:

Presentation: how you look. This covers staff, furniture, anything with an appearance.

Personality. What would your customers say about you if they could describe you in three words or less? Part of your personality is knowing your role – who you want to be. Victoria wanted her library to be a community center, robust and full of life and energy.

Programming. What you do and/or provide. Victoria found libraries say “no” a lot. So she started saying yes. One of her first steps was to make reference circulating. When items weren’t allowed out of the building, they wound up disappearing. When people were allowed to check items out, these items would come back. There was usage.

Care answers the customer’s question, “Who am I to you?” Some examples of “wonder working words” that show that you care: “I’m sorry,” “will you while I?” and “I was wrong.” After every interaction and meeting one way to show care is to solicit questions, comments or concerns, or as Victoria says, QCC. Don’t assume everything is clear. This opens up the communication for knowledge sharing.

Weeding isn’t just for books. A few rules to remember:

• Show great love to the happy.
• Show diligent action to the unhappy.
• Show the door to the perpetually unhappy or harmful.

This kind of action happens everyday in restaurants, bars and other environments. These actions show that you care about your internal and external customer.

Connection. How we feel together, or the relationships. We spend a lot of time thinking about our relationship to the public, but we shouldn’t have two sets of behaviors between the public and our peers.

Customization. How are you unique? What is your brand? If you can’t get more staff or money, what can you do to attract people to your library? One way is by distinguishing your collections from other libraries, or perhaps by serving a special or discarded population.

In the end it’s all about delighting the customer. Use technology to your advantage to say you care, and dip into your own pocket if you have to.

And remember, you may not have to hear praise or words of encouragement for doing your job, but someone on your staff may take those words and see that you care.

Nancy Pearl
First I arrive bright and early to see Nancy Pearl speak. It was fascinating to hear how each of her books came into being, especially her lastest book, Book Crush. She gave some suggestions of books for children and teens such as :
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Alex Rider Series by Anthony Horowitz
The Paperboy by Pete Dexter
Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Lee
Each Little Bird that Sings by Deborah Wiles
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
The Great Good Thing by Rod Townley
Ragweed by Avi
The Teacher’s Funeral by Richard Peck
Thirsty by MT Anderson
Feed by MT Anderson
Looking for Normal by Betty Monthei
Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis

Off the Chain: Reader’s Advisory for Exploding Genres
I really enjoyed this program. I won’t go into too many details because one of my fellow bloggers have done a great job detailing the program. I know that RUSA/PLA CODES will be having the handouts from their program on their websites. I found the program very interesting and has given me more authors and books to add to my list of books to read. I liked the many ways of finding out about new literature online, such as lit blogs and email lists as well as MySpace.

English Only: Censorship and its Impact on Latino Children and Young Adults in Schools and Public Libraries
I came into this program about half way through but I am glad I did. This program was given by AFL REFORMA. I missed the presentation part, but I did come in just as they started the discussion groups for different types of libraries. The public library discussion group was led by Rose Trevino. This gave people from different library systems a chance to ask questions and talk about how their library systems have their foreign languages materials placed in the collection and any programming that they have in foreign languages. Suggestions were also given on how to start a collection or to grow your current collection.

Future Friends: Marketing Reference and User Services to Generation X
This program was given by RUSA RSS. The handouts for this program will also be posted on RUSA’s blog. First the presenters went into defining Generation X and the facts about this generation. They then presented what this particular generation are looking for when it comes to services and potential segments of this generation. After defining Generation X, the presentation then went into how this would pertain to advertising to this generation and the different stages to planning advertising.
The next part of this program had St. Charles Library system in Illinois talk about their programs that they have for 20- and 30-somethings’ as well how they market those programs. They also gave examples of different programs, such as a cooking for 1 or 2 program, white elephant exchange, creating a safe online presence, a course on wine, and an history crawl of the town. Then they followed with some of the challenges that they have had with marketing as well as what they have learned.
Following this presentation was another presentation on the Young Friends of the Kansas City Public Library a.k.a BooksEnds. They went over what the group was and also how they marketed to their Generation X population.

Final Thoughts on ALA Annual Conference 2007
Unfortunately this was my last day at the conference. After attending different programs on Sunday, I took the time to go to the Library School Reunion Event at the Rennaissance Mayflower Hotel. It was great being able to see some fellow alumni from University of South Florida along with some of the professors that I had taken classes from. It was a good way to end my last day at the conference. I have had a blast at this year’s Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. I am looking forward to the next time I can attend an Annual Conference. I have found out a lot of useful information to take back to my library. I also have had a great time blogging about my experiences and the different programs that I have attended. So it’s been fun and I hope all those staying through Tuesday ave a great rest of conference. This is Catherine Moffatt signing off.

I read this bit of “what do you do?” on the WebJunction Publib listserv (May 4, Vol 26, Issue 4). The contact for responses is listed below, but feel free to comment on this post and let us know what you do, so that other librarians can benefit from your experiences. We can also use the comments you leave here for building out part of the policies section of the Public Library Wiki project here at PLA.

ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy is collecting information on the trend described below. If you would like to share your library’s experience with this issue, please send an email to Carrie Lowe (), Information Policy Specialist at OITP.

Question: If your library suspends checkout privileges when patrons receive a certain overdue fine threshold, does it also restrict access to computers and/or internet access? Does your library restrict access to anything else when a patron reaches this threshold? If you have a policy about this issue, what does it say?

“People vote with their feet”
We live in a world where libraries compete with the likes of Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, at home wifi, movies on demand, Netflix, “Send to phone” options, and more, it’s about service. Karen’s Big Fear is that “Libraries (and what they can offer) will be increasingly irrelevant and invisible to the majority of people.” In my mind, the Web 2.0 world of membership to many networks including MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Google and Yahoo! Groups, and more, emphasizes that people like to *belong* in places (the amazing competition for numbers of Friends aside). Karen points out that if libraries are to become The Third Place, which implies a place you go that isn’t home, isn’t work, but doesn’t make you feel like a loser to be there, we need to provide quality service that is centered on the customer.

I believe that the idea of foot voting can apply to the online branch of your library (the web site), as well. Creating a site that’s easy to use from home, that highlights online services like databases and other paid services and makes them easy to access, and use technologies that appeal to patrons but also serve specific purposes to the library and the site. It keeps libraries relevant, but also gives you a whole other point of service for people who don’t come to the library proper.

Don’t feel like a loser, feel like you belong
So what brings people to The Third Place? While Karen answered this question ten times over this morning, talking about using failure as a learning experience, ditching your rules (especially the ones that sound dumb to patrons), offering choices, and all sorts of things that are, generally, considered work that is worth it, the major bits I want to focus on are about customer centrism, and just plain caring.

Libraries and librarians need to accept that we *cannot* change customer behaviors. Anyone who has tried to teach someone how to use Google, or how to search the catalog the way a librarian searches a catalog should know. I look at it as a sort of “March of the Librarians” for patrons: observe how customers do things, examine their customs and habits, ask questions about what would work, talk it over, then apply it. Get out of your head, and get into the customer’s head. Everything from library displays to text messaging to Library Elf, it all fits in here. The “Have it your way” Burger King approach can go a long way to making customers feel right at home, improve the perception of the library, and increase foot traffic physically and virtually.

And what could remind someone more of a place where they want to be than caring? People who work in libraries *need* to care. It’s a service industry, and attitude directly affects anyone’s ability to provide quality service. The best thing libraries can do when they recruit new staff members, and the best thing library schools can do in recruiting students), is to find people who care about providing good service, who care about doing a good job, who aren’t bitter and disconnected, who seek an opportunity to help people, an who really care about the profession (and aren’t there to live the stereotype). Make sure that the people you hire and that people you have are doing what they care about, as opposed to what they couldn’t care less about, avoiding the “children’s librarian who hates children” syndrome.

Libraries need workers who care about libraries, care about their jobs, and care about the people they serve (you know, without going overboard, or being crazy stalkerish about it). Caring can be the ginseng/caffeine/gingko punch for your professional life, if you let it. If you’re already trapped there at your job, and you can’t get away, even if you are unhappy, why not make it festive by caring. If you care, they’ll care, and everyone is happy.

Go to Step 12: Make something happen
Even just with the two points of service and caring, libraries can really start to do something and make a difference, and doing the work, however much or little, will create results that are overwhelmingly worth it.

“The muffin isn’t moldy… It just looks moldy.” Karen told us the story of buying a muffin at Gloria Jean’s in the Philadelphia airport. She complained because the muffin looked moldy- apparently this was a common complaint, because batter was mixed in the same bowl as the blueberry batter and created the unusual green palour. As a frequent complaint- why didn’t Gloria Jean’s change the product? A conference participant behind me called out, “we’d make a brochue to explain it!” The room erupted in laughter, but clearly we try to change the cusotmer more often than we change our service or approach.
Like brochures, sign pollution means no one reads signs. “You pay a price for every sign.” is one of Karen’s rules. Signs should be respectful not negative and disrespectful- will it even work?

“Get a grip.” Leaving the victimized librarian attitude behind, own the things that bother you. Finish the following sentence: “My problem is that I…” Among Karen’s examples, try moving services, install skateboard storage, and allow eating in the library. No decision is without consequences, but we should put about customer service first.